Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2016 12:01:29 +0200 From: Ralf Mardorf <ralf.mardorf@rocketmail.com> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: borderline OT fireox question Message-ID: <20160714120129.08aceea1@moonstudio> In-Reply-To: <20160714063744.snaqwdbmzhd4ndb5@dijkstra.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de> References: <5e4a20fe-51a4-ac10-4f72-23fcc3d04c15@hiwaay.net> <20160714002117.224b64ae@archlinux.localdomain> <8cd76e2e-ed11-7b3b-be75-de6bb4dcc092@hiwaay.net> <20160714063744.snaqwdbmzhd4ndb5@dijkstra.sfs.uni-tuebingen.de>
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On Thu, 14 Jul 2016 08:37:44 +0200, Dani=C3=ABl de Kok wrote: >On Wed, Jul 13, 2016 at 11:14:26PM +0000, William A. Mahaffey III >wrote: >> OK, but where is that history kept, & how do they associate past & >> current searches ? =20 I don't know, but it's deleted if I delete everything, e.g. cookies and cache, but keep browsing and download history. Btw. I only tested this after your request, I don't use this search thingy maself, I'm old school and open a search engine by address bar or speed dial. I also replaced Firefox with IceCat (another fork is Pale Moon), but my favourite replacement is QupZilla, it's not really a fork, but very close to Firefox and based on WebKit, so it never slows down as Firefox and it's forks do. However, regarding privacy the forks are better than Firefox is. If you want to ensure that Firefox doesn't "phone home" after e.g. editing about:config, launch Firefox and Wireshark only ;) and repeat it after a week, two weeks ... ;). >I think that there are two possibilities: > >1. You see a correlation that does not really exist - Google is just > suggesting probably completions of a query, and other people search > similar things as you do. > >2. Google does track you, and is using other means to uniquely >identify you. > EFF's Panopticlick [1] shows that most browsers have a fingerprint > that is very unique. E.g. it finds that my particular browser > fingerprint is unique among 132,254 browsers so far. > >At any rate, I agree with the grandparent poster: if you don't want >Google to track you, don't use Google. StartPage is a good suggestion, >you also might want to look into DuckDuckGo. The problem with Startpage is, that it provides privacy, but anyway relies on Google. The issue with DuckDuckGo is, less good search results, especially for other languages than English, at least for German searches. Regards, Ralf
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